


Discipline

by ishafel



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-13
Updated: 2011-02-13
Packaged: 2017-10-15 15:02:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/162005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were things Lymond learned in the galleys, that he could not have learned elsewhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Discipline

There are lessons to be learned, even on the galleys-things taught there that were not taught at the Sorbonne or in the English and Scottish courts. They are almost certainly not the lessons that Margaret Lennox meant Lymond to learn. If she meant him to survive at all.

For Francis Crawford of Lymond at seventeen was not likely to survive among the condemned men who served and died, chained to their places in the bowels of the Valeureuse. He was a gentleman's son, Lymond, with a gentleman's education: music and poetry and classical languages, philosophy and fencing. He was only a pretty boy who had played at being a spy. And he had learned to fight for his life, but as a gentleman did: under the open sky, with a sword, from the back of a horse. He knew little enough of the galleys, and nothing of the galériens, the men whose labor drove them. And yet, desperate and cruel as those men were, there was not one among them so vicious, so ruthless, or so beautiful as Margaret Lennox, niece to the King of England.

And Lymond, who had survived her, survived the galleys as well. And he did not only live but also learned: the skills to which no true gentlemen was suited, that stood him in such good stead in later years: the arts of fighting with a knife in close quarters, and fighting with no weapon at all; the art of fighting with words instead of swords; the art of lying with a man and bringing pleasure to both of them.

For in this, of all things, Lymond had been most untutored. And being a beautiful boy set to work among condemned men, and being condemned himself, he learned that good men and bad take pleasure where they find it, and learn to find it where they can take it. In this, perhaps, they were not so different than Margaret Lennox; she had tutored him in both pleasure and pain, and in the pleasure that pain can bring.

He was very young, and when he came to the galleys, as near to innocent as any protégé of Margaret Lennox's could be. And pride, even then, was his besetting sin. He fought, very hard, to keep his pride; he still thought then that he had a choice. He came closer to losing his life to his oar-mates then to the whip, or in battle. But he learned submission if he could not learn humility. He learned to open his mouth beneath a man's as he would a woman's; he learned to open his body as a woman would. He learned, and did not break: he learned to enjoy what was being done to him.

And in the galleys he learned hatred, did Francis Crawford of Lymond; learned a hate as implacable as Margaret Lennox's ambition. And he survived, though the oars scored his hands and the whip cut into his back. He had come to the galleys a boy, a brilliant and dangerous boy; he left them a far more dangerous and far more brilliant man, possessed of the skills he would need to wage a private war, and a consuming hatred.


End file.
